2017Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE

SIGPARSE is ACL's special interest group on natural language parsing. The main purposes of the SIG are: to promote interest in the parsing of natural languages; to provide a means of disseminating information about natural language parsing; to ensure the continuity of the biennial 'International Conferences on Parsing Technologies' (IWPT); and to endorse relevant meetings and workshops, such as SPMRL (Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages).

The next SIGPARSE event is IWPT 2017, the 15th International Conference on Parsing Technologies (http://compling.ucdavis.edu/iwpt2017), which will take place in Pisa from September 20 to September 22, 2017.

Hosting and local organization is being handled by the University of Pisa and ILC-CNR (Giuseppe Attardi, University of Pisa; Felice Dell’Orletta, ILC-CNR, Pisa; Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa; Simonetta Montemagni, ILC-CNR, Pisa; Maria Simi, University of Pisa). Kenji Sagae (UC Davis, USA) is general chair for the conference and the program chair is Yusuke Miyao (National Institute of Informatics, Japan). The conference has two invited speakers, Vera Demberg (Saarland University) and David Hall (Semantic Machines).

For the first time, IWPT will be co-located this year with Depling (http://depling.org), and the two conferences will co-host the first shared task on Extrinsic Parser Evaluation (EPE 2017, http://epe.nlpl.eu). The co-organizers defined a common interchange format for a broad range of dependency representations and built an open-source infrastructure for end-to-end evaluation using three state-of-the-art downstream systems, for biological event detection, negation analysis, and opinion mining. The task received submissions from nine teams.

The current SIGPARSE officers are:

• Eric Villemonte de la Clergerie (INRIA, President)
• Stephan Oepen (Univ. of Oslo, Secretary)
• Yuji Matsumoto (NAIST - Information Officer),
• Kenji Sagae (USC - Information Officer)
• Anders Søgaard (Univ. Copenhagen - Information Officer).

The next election should be organized in January 2019.

SIGPARSE maintains a website (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./sigparse/) that contains information about the SIG, upcoming activities, and instructions for joining the membership and the mailing list. As of July 10, 2017, there are 256 members of SIGPARSE. Membership count is based on the sigparse mailing list, which automatically purges invalid addresses, and to which anyone is free to subscribe.